Kang Il-chul, 87, with Lee Ok-sun, 88, in the background, speaks during a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday.
Photograph: Shizuo Kambayashi/AP

Two women who were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese military during the second world war have rejected the recent agreement between Japan and South Korea on the “comfort women” issue, saying it had made them “look like fools”.

Lee Ok-sun, 88, and Kang Il-chul, 87, said during a visit to Tokyo on Tuesday that they had not been consulted, and called on the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to offer a face-to-face apology and provide official compensation.

“This deal has made us look like fools,” Kang told reporters. “It was agreed without consulting us. How could they have agreed on this and pushed us to one side? I’m furious.”

Last month, Japan and South Korea achieved an apparent breakthrough in the long-running dispute when Tokyo agreed to contribute 1bn yen to a South Korean fund set up to help survivors.

Abe offered an indirect apology “to all of the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incalculable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women”.

Tokyo also acknowledged that its wartime military authorities had played a role in the women’s sexual enslavement, but avoided any admission of legal responsibility, describing the cash as a humanitarian gesture. In return, Seoul said it accepted the issue was resolved “finally and irreversibly”, adding that it would not raise it at the United Nations or in other international forums.

But the agreement has been criticised by surviving women and their supporters. “It is as if the Japanese government is waiting for us to stop speaking out and die,” Lee said on Tuesday.

Of the 238 South Korean women who were officially recognised as victims of wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese military, only 46 are still alive, with an average age of 89.

Kang was in her mid-teens when Japanese military police arrived at her home in South Korea and told her she was being conscripted during Japan’s 35-year colonisation of the Korean peninsula, which ended with its defeat in 1945.

She was one of as many as 200,000 women, most of whom were Korean, who were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in frontline brothels before and during the war.

Kang and Lee, who live with eight other survivors at the House of Sharing, a private facility near Seoul, have asked to speak to Abe in person. But the meeting is unlikely to happen. “Not only has Abe not apologised, but he hasn’t even tried to meet us,” Kang said. “Why doesn’t he come out and apologise? We want him to meet us face to face.”

Another potential sticking point to December’s landmark agreement is the fate of a statue of a girl representing comfort women that has stood outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul since late 2011.

The South Korean government said it would try to persuade the private group that erected the statue to remove it, but insisted it had not offered any guarantees. Japanese media, however, quoted a government source as saying that Abe regards the removal of the statue as a condition for the provision of the funds.

Filipino wartime rape victims push for compensation from Japan

Read more

The women’s rejection of the agreement came as former sex slaves from the Philippines called on the country’s president, Benigno Aquino, to raise their plight with the Japanese emperor and empress, who arrived in Manila on Tuesday for an official visit.

“My message for our president is that the abuses against us must be addressed,” Narcisa Claveria, 85, told reporters, according to Kyodo News. “We have yet to receive real justice. We were so young, but a lot was already taken from us. We lost our dignity. We weren’t able to go to school. We suffered under the Japanese soldiers.”

Japan, however, has said it is not planning to reach comfort women agreements with any countries other than South Korea.

In 1993, Japan’s then chief cabinet secretary, Yōhei Kōno, acknowledged and apologised for the first time for Japan’s use of sex slaves. Japan, however, has refused to directly compensate the women, saying all claims were settled in a 1965 treaty that restored diplomatic ties. It set up the privately run Asian Women’s Fund in 1995, but many surviving sex slaves refused money unless it came directly from the Japanese government. The fund was disbanded in 2007.

Kang, who was taken to China, where she lived until her return to South Korea in 2000, still bears the physical and emotional scars of her ordeal. “I was put in a tiny room and made to sleep with about 10 to 20 soldiers a day,” she told the Guardian in 2012.

“I was punched and beaten so much that my body was covered in bruises. I still get headaches.”